


i like falling off my skateboard the way i like loving you

by carlemon



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Ambiguous Angst, Cuddling & Snuggling, Identity Issues, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-12
Updated: 2017-12-12
Packaged: 2019-02-13 20:54:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12992325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carlemon/pseuds/carlemon
Summary: Some nights, how much Jiang's been worn down shows.





	i like falling off my skateboard the way i like loving you

**Author's Note:**

> title from a **softer world.**  
>  i like falling off my skateboard the way i like loving you. _broken hearts, like broken bones, hurt well._

Jiang holds him in the nights when to exist means tossing and turning sleepless nights away, unfounded terrors pricking glasslike at his throat. Prokopenko knows him by the hop-skip of his bare-footed gait over Kavinsky's white carpet where it bleeds into lino, his Zippo-and-pomade smell, the ragged heave of his breath. (His smoker's breath.) He knows him by how tight he goes when Prokopenko rolls away from his side of the bed, teasing at unwilling, unwanted solace, his jagged, bitten nails fisting like a child's into Prokopenko's hitched-up shirt.

On nights like those, —like these, in fact— Prokopenko allows himself to play at normalcy, immersing himself in the boyhood that's been eluding him recently. He rearranges himself into a mess of splayed edges, skewed limbs, one palm ghosting over his own face and the other at Jiang's pulled-in shoulders. Kavinsky's not the only one who can pull and play and mold to his will— Prokopenko's got his tricks too, most evident when he's settling into an easy resting place for Jiang's sharp, scared, _wanting_ , edges and points. "Howsit?" Some nights, he hazards a joke, (as charmingly guileless, humourless as he'd once been) digs his clammy fingers into the corners of Jiang's ruin-red mouth, pulling his features into an unwilling smile. "Howsit, Jiang? Y'cold, man? You wanna cuddle?"

Some nights Jiang laughs shrilly and when he responds with a caustic "oh, yeah, Proko; I wanna fucking _cuddle_ ," he has to bite it out. Others, nights like these, he folds wordlessly into Prokopenko's long loopy arms and lets him fret over the over-gelled spikes of his hair, suffusing the both of them with the smells of pomade and sweat and ash. Nights like these, his mouth is keen and hard and trembling at Prokopenko's collar, all his profanities literal baby-breath, sweetly artless, on Prokopenko's forged-feigned- _faked_ gooseflesh. "I missed ya, Proko," he'll insist, close to sobbing it out, a tiny pointed thing unsure of what to do with his teeth and talons, breath wracked. " _Imissedyou_ , man. I missed you, I— it wasn't my fucking _fault_ —"

So Prokopenko will do what he does best, and handle him like he wants to be. They don't fuck these nights. Prokopenko's become such a dim murky thing, a malleable thing, a putty effigy of what once was, but even reduced to the barest sum of his parts, he knows— he knows he can't fuck Jiang how he is these nights, how the both of them are, (a jigsaw of unfading bruises and hot-scalding tears and nails dug into the hollows of frailly forged bones)that _they aren't like that, anymore._  Sometimes, Jiang cries, teeth grinding against each other, all of him rigid to the touch. Prokopenko ghosts his mouth over his temple, his nape, stroking his taut sinewy form, mumbles, "Easy,  _Jee_ -yang." His grin is sloppy around it, resonating of wet kisses in the Golf, in the Supras, in one of many dreamt Mitsus. "Easy, I got you." 

Jiang holds him in the lucid, smoky nights when the realisation of what Prokopenko (their Proko, their dim, crass-mouthed baseball-boy smelling of ganja and freshly-mowed grass) is and will be becomes too much, and he does so with tears cutting into his cheeks and Prokopenko's flat tongue lapping at the weeping and seeping of an old wound reopened. Jiang holds him hissing "God, don't fuckin' call me that,  _christ,_ Proko," into his chest, on nights when he's too tired and teary and guilty to remark on the simulated too-slow  _thudthudthud_ of Prokopenko's sleepy heartbeat. Jiang holds him 'til he gets the stones to bite out a desperate _(flammable)_ "I still love ya, y'know— I still love you, Pro'penko, _Iloveya_ , man—" in his unmuffled wild boy _(fire starter)_ voice, his restless doped-up touch and salty kisses licking heat _(a fire hazard)_ into the slow viscous thrum of what Prokopenko's become in his entirety.

 _My feral boy,_ muses Prokopenko as lucidly (and poetically, and boyishly) as he can.  _My personal fuckin' disaster._

Once upon a time they'd been wild kids, god-kids spanning the whole fucking world in their powerful strides, gilding each other with kisses with too much tongue and too many teeth, smiling. Either that or they'd been delinquents. Bastard children, mongrel mutts. Jiang'd slung careless arms around his shoulders, bouncing off him, volleying himself off of him. Together they carved out hovels in the ground where they held each other, nipping at skin scuffed raw out of affection and only that, swapping snapbacks and sweaters and barbs and jibes in between kisses and manoeuvres around Kavinsky. They'd fucked holding hands. Joseph'd looked at them as if as three they were made one and as whole, with a smile more messy than malevolent as Jiang landed a jump off his favourite Henrietta halfpipe, laughing madly.

Now they flit in and out of each other's orbits and lament Prokopenko as a dead boy walking and don't go to the skatepark to one-up each other for beers and blunts anymore. Now Kavinsky laughs empty and Prokopenko thick, all of what he is and what he used to be coming to him slowly and only then in brief, braying glimpses, as if fighting through molasses. (When he tells Jiang  _easy, don't cry, I love you still_ it's thick, sticky. Like syrup, like codeine.) Now Jiang holds him during sleepless nights in their dorm or in the Kavinsky McMansion, pretending he's just crying instead of _mourning_ unheeded, blinking up at Prokopenko like he's seeing him laid out in a night-terror or an open casket dig.

Pressed flush to him, Jiang drums the drumline of Skov's trapstep bullshit into the spaces between Prokopenko's ribs. His blinks are long, slow, protracted. Prokopenko thumbs the wretched curl of his mouth clumsily, doing what he does best, smoothing him down into nothing. "Easy," he tells him, "easy, you'll wake 'im up." He nods, sleepy, at the slumbering form of Swan, fitting perfectly into the dorm, into Aglionby and Henrietta, when he himself doesn't really fit anywhere, not anymore. 

Jiang's sharp tongue rolls out a scoff that cracks highly, horrifically. (Prokopenko knows him by his poison and cinder-breath brought into all forms of intimacy, made into guttural rolling moans as Prokopenko settled, grinning, between his legs.) "Fuck 'im. Fuck'em, Proko, man, y'know I still— I still love you, man. I didn't mean, I mean, it wasn't my fucking fault. You gotta— you gotta understand, I _still—"_ He looks up, plaintive. Prokopenko was not the only one left  _odd,_ a lesson in the uncanny valley, when Kavinsky stuck his hands into him and played hacky-sack with his heart and liver. Still, Prokopenko understands. Still, he chases that small light of recognition from the days when his sloppy grin was uninhibited and sharp and he ached and bristled with sunburn and glass shards in his knees, and ollied, cumbersome, around the Mountain View skate park and the Aglionby banisters. 

Nights like these he'll hold Jiang close enough to steal the air out of him, air he doesn't want and Prokopenko doesn't need. He'll tell him, "I got no fucking idea what you're talking about, Jiang," and when Jiang's eyes close grateful _(desperate),_ he'll kiss his eyelids with his tongue dragging out his teeth, like he used to. Nights like these they'll fall asleep together and Jiang'll sneak out come morning, as if Swan still cares, and Prokopenko—

Prokopenko'll make like a live thing and take his punches and kisses and hurting whispers in the dead of night like he hurts too. For now, he pets Jiang's sweaty back. For now, he listens to his breath align to Jiang's, his shudders reverberating through the both of them, through the bed. For now, he tells Jiang "Aw, I love you too, stop crying, y'fag, _c'mon_ ," and when Jiang begins to cackle, hiccupy and uncertain and endlessly grateful, he can almost believe it too.


End file.
